IndexNow protocol launched
Microsoft and Yandex launched an open push protocol letting sites notify participating search engines the moment a URL is added, updated or deleted.
What changed
IndexNow lets a site ping a single endpoint when content changes, and participating engines share the notification with each other, replacing repeated speculative crawling with publisher-initiated push. Bing and Yandex were the founding participants, with Seznam and Naver joining later, and CDN and platform integrations from Cloudflare, Akamai, Duda and others followed. Google has said it is evaluating the protocol but has never adopted it. Adoption grew substantially as AI answer engines increased the value of fast content discovery.
Timing
Rollout began 18 October 2021. No completion date was announced. Rankings typically remain unstable for the whole rollout window, so measurements taken inside it are not a reliable read on the outcome.